Kashmiri Yakhni Pulao | Instant Pot Recipe

Dinners where you can cook everything in a single pot are one of my favorite things. This recipe for Kashmiri Yakhni Pulao is one of those recipes, and you’re going to love it. When you look at the pictures, this looks like just another chicken and rice dish, but it’s so much more flavorful than that.

Kashmiri Yakhni Pulao is full of delicious spices like garlic, cinnamon, cardamom, and cloves and they all come together beautifully in the chicken. The rice is cooked separately in the chicken broth at the end, making it much more flavorful than plain white rice.

Kashmiri Yakhni Pulao

Yakhni Pulaos and biryanis have a lot in common in that they are both a mix of meat and rice cooked together. But what makes a Yakhni different is that it is all about the rich, meaty broth that you create. It’s actually a very simple, comforting dish and all the flavor comes from the meat broth and the spices.

In contrast, biryanis often have a lot of other spices and aromatics such as onions, garlic, mint, yogurt etc. added, as with this Lamb Biryani Recipe here.

Another way this yakhni pulao recipe is different from a biryani, is that the spices are left whole and are cooked in a cheesecloth pouch, and then discarded after cooking, unlike most recipes where you grind the spices and put them directly on the meat itself. This allows the meat to be infused with the flavors of the spices, and not just topped with them.

Thirdly, for a yakhni pulao, you have to cook it in two stages: One to make the broth, and the other to cook the rice in that yummy broth.

Pressure cooking this Kashmiri Yakhni Pulao in your Instant Pot also helps it to be infused with the flavors from the spice pouch. This also saves time from grinding up spices, or from spices losing their flavor because they were ground too long ago. Make it and tell me what you think!

5 from 3 votes

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Kashmiri Yakhni Pulao |Instant Pot Rice and Chicken

Prep Time

10mins

Cook Time

15mins

Total Time

50mins

Dinners, where you can cook everything in a single pot, are one of my favorite things. This recipe for Kashmiri Yakhni Pulao is one of those recipes, and you're going to love it. When you look at the pictures, this looks like just another chicken and rice dish, but it's so much more flavorful than that.